


storm tossed

by thosehalcyondays



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, More Fluff than Smut, episode 78, short fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-09
Updated: 2016-12-09
Packaged: 2018-09-07 12:45:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8801353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thosehalcyondays/pseuds/thosehalcyondays
Summary: She would not be the Vex’ahlia he adored if she was not undoing him in some way.





	

**Author's Note:**

> so, you know, _that happened_ , and this wouldn't leave my head, so I wrote it down. I just really wanted this to be the thing Percy was gonna talk about and not at all because I'm dying to know what the Grey Hunt is.

She would not be the Vex’ahlia he adored if she was not undoing him in some way.

That had been true since day one, when they found him, a wreck of a boy running away from his problems and she, a handful of years his senior, chipped straight through his shoddy armor with a wink and a smile. Giving him enough to make him _want_ , but not enough to make him forget the mess that he was, not enough that he’d take that reckless step towards her.

Percy’s fingers fumble for the neck of the bottle and fight off the cork the moment the heavy door is slammed shut. She makes no move to cover herself, because of course she doesn’t, why on earth would she; they both know what happens now. She presses against his back (naked--so _completely_ naked, gods' pity but he never had a prayer at all, did he) and slides a slender arm around him as he tips the bottle back and burns his throat with Courage. He coughs, softly, angling his head away from her, and he feels as much as he hears her hum in amusement as she plucks the bottle from his hand to sample the taste.

He’d had things to say. He’d had a _plan_. He’d brought these bottles of drinks that had been crafted and brewed here in Whitestone for hundreds of years so she could take her pick and sample them while he told her of the Grey Hunt, the tradition of it, her place in it. To finally, truly share Whitestone with her, to show her this meager portion of the city’s very soul in these twilight hours before battle. 

(Percy had given her a title because he could, because she thought she needed a shield against judgement and scorn, but he understood, almost too late, that it wasn’t enough. _You allowed me to be apart of the thing you hold dearest_ , except he really hadn’t, and he wonders how it is that he didn’t see, didn’t realize that it was important to her, and how, _how_ can you walk beside someone for so long and miss something that should have been so obvious? It took dying for him to understand, and if it should happen again that she survive while he did not, he needed her to help keep the city’s soul alive. To trust her hands to work in tandem with Cassandra’s, to nurture and care for the tangled garden that was his battered and beaten but not broken home.)

But there was no gain to be had in speaking if she’d already made it quite clear she was done with his words ( _Do you want to talk before or after_ sounded much more like _not at all_ and he is so undone, so thoroughly and easily seduced that for once, he is done with his words, too). She takes the feverish kiss as the surrender it’s meant to be, and her fingers fasten tightly to his lapels and pull him in. He is flushed and dazed with hurried drink and with Vex’ahlia, with the _storm_ of her. Impatient hands that tug and yank at the layers that keep his skin from her skin, eager mouth that pulls at his, teeth that press to the jumping pulse in his neck and gently close around it--they are buffeting winds that rock him as he clings to her in this graceless dance. 

(He is still a wreck of a man, but he is mending, and his broken places fit well with hers, and maybe all there is to life and love is finding the places where your jagged pieces will not rip and rend and ruin.) 

He snares the tail of her braid with a fingertip and works off the band, and in that there is the briefest moment of pause, a slowing of their frenetic drag and pull. There is no part of her to undress, but the act of separating the interwoven mass of heavy strands is a small act of undoing. At least, it’s something _new_. He has seen her naked before, but he has never buried his hands in her hair, he has never seen the way her eyes go hazy and dark when a lover’s fingertips graze across her scalp. In the slower breaths of that lulling moment he is struck by how delicate and small her face seems when cradled between his hands. His thumb traces angles he has never had cause to touch before--curve of eyebrows, slope of cheekbones, the path mapped in the faint constellation of freckles that dust her nose and cheeks, the bow of plumped and pinkened lips.

And then her lips close around his thumb, and the eye of the storm passes them by. They fall in a messy tumble to the mattress of Vex'ahlia's bed, and there is much more new to peel back and discover.

 

They lay tangled together in the tempest-tossed bedding, and her fingers tunnel in his hair in lazy strokes where only minutes ago they twisted and gripped with demand, and he watches her through the filter of new discoveries. She is comfortable and confident and content, rosily naked and smug, so cat-full-of-canary that the feathers she tucks behind her ears could just as easily be found clinging to her lips. 

( _Beautiful_ is too common a word, but he's been chasing the right word for years and still hasn't found it, so the common will have to do.)

They could _talk_ now, in the warm glow of the _after_ , but dawn is a heavy looming shadow of dread and uncertainty (it nearly always is, but what tomorrow brings with it is more frightening and terrible than anything they have ever faced before, and they both know it) and he will not leave her at a disadvantage by keeping her awake. Already her fingers are stilling, their breaths slower and deeper, their blinking eyes growing heavier and sluggish until they close and do not open again.

There will be a later, or there will not, and nothing he could say now would change that. He will try one more new thing before dawn comes; he will reach for a sliver of faith, in Vex, in Cass, in the world as a whole, that life in Whitestone will thrive and grow and flourish, with or without him.


End file.
